A Close Read of Main Library's Art / There's a new take on the spiral staircase and a catalog of cards

KENNETH BAKER, Chronicle Art Critic

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Though not without shortcomings, the public artworks built into San Francisco's new Main Library function improbably well.

This is a surprise because, judged by how frequently they fail, works for public places are the area of highest creative risk in the visual arts today.

Unfortunately, the most conspicuous piece in the New Main is an artistic weak spot: "Constellation" by San Franciscan Nayland Blake stretches upward five stories. The library's grand staircase unfolds around it.

"Constellation" is a high- tech update of an old-fashioned library architectural convention, a frieze of famous literary names around the roofline. Writers' names appear stenciled on flat ovals of glass to which light is conducted by thick fiber-optic filaments.

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Looking like slick sconces, the glass elements are scattered in a grid, protruding from the five-story dark green wall of metal plates that is the work's armature. The fixtures are designed so each author's name appears both as a radiant dropped-out stencil and as a shadow in a pool of light cast back onto the metal wall.

"Constellation" contains the names of 160 authors, selected by a committee with comment from neighborhood meetings. (The piece can accommodate 200 more.) They range from the once-controversial, such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Gertrude Stein, to local heroes such as M.F.K. Fisher, Randy Shilts and Phil Frank, to some we may not think of primarily as writers, such as Erwin Schroedinger and Marie Curie.

If "Constellation" starts arguments over which authors ought to have their names in lights, fine.

But missing is any hint of how writers and their works might be linked, historically, bibliographically or in a reader's life. A measure of celebrity -- which "Constellation" can now confer as well as record -- is the only connection among writers and their works that it recognizes.

READING AS STAR SEARCH

"Constellation" would be more at home in a boutique bookstore, where names really are currency, than in a library, which should represent reading as something more than a star search.

The back views of Blake's piece, incidentally, where all that can be seen are the glowing veins of its fiber optics, are more involving visually than its public face. They call to mind the work of Bay Area light artist Milton Komisar.

New York installation maker Alice Aycock has taken the biggest chances of any artist involved in the New Main. Her work is the most ungainly and, in its apparent arbitrariness, the most like what we probably expect public art to be. Startlingly, it comes off.

Aycock's two-part piece is monumental in scale and required close collaboration with the library's principal architect, James Ingo Freed. Its key element, "Functional and Fantasy Staircase," a huge inverted loosely spiraled cone of aluminum, encloses a functional staircase that links a fifth-floor bridge to the floor below.

A companion piece Aycock calls "Cyclone Fragment" is freer in form because it has no practical purpose. It hangs in a glass- walled space, adjacent to another interior bridge, above the third-level media center.

Approaching Aycock's staircase along the top-floor bridge, all you see at first is the flaring upward end of the silvery cone. Get closer and you glimpse the tilted, pleated metal element that wraps around it: a set of stairs in midair. As you reach the top of the real staircase, the other end of the "fantasy" staircase comes into view.

We might see a symbolic echo of reading in the release from gravity and fear that the fantasy stairs promise. Or they might be emblems of the pleasure in natural light and elevation that standing high in Freed's crystalline building produces, if you are not prone to vertigo.

"Cyclone Fragment" is another conical form that uncoils into a long spiral ribbon, braced by tubular struts. Surely Aycock refers here to one of the great unbuilt public projects of the 20th century, V.I. Tatlin's 1919 "Monument to the Third International," which would have been an openwork spiral structure enclosing, among other things, a sort of media center for revolutionary propaganda.

Aycock has coupled this esoteric allusion with a goofy remembrance of the old admonition on paper-handling from early computer days: "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate."

The untitled collaborative work by Ann Chamberlain and Ann Hamilton is the most poignant and involving of the New Main's art installations. Like so many other libraries, the New Main has replaced its century-old card catalog with a computer database.

Recognizing that this innovation would rob the institution of some of its humanity, Chamberlain and Hamilton arranged to salvage it literally by papering interior walls of the New Main with the old catalog cards. They hired scores of people to annotate the cards -- at a dollar apiece -- in a dozen languages with quotes from the books, other connected sources or personal responses.

The cards were then embedded in the plaster of the library's main diagonal wall on three floors. Many of the cards are illegible, but they are fascinating to explore all the same.

To my knowledge this is San Francisco's first postmodernist public art. It turns real traces of the library's history into a shimmering mosaic that whispers, with mingled awe and condescension, "How could people ever have done things that way?"

SENTIMENTAL CEILING

Finally, the ceiling painting in the New Main's Gay and Lesbian Center, by San Francisco muralists Mark Evans and Charley Brown, is a bland success. An image in sepia on silvery metal leaf, it marries the proletarian neoclassicism of WPA art with the dizzying overhead recession of baroque and rococo ceiling painting.

"Into the Light" shows a group of ordinary folks building a pantheon (stone walls) chiseled with the names of gay and lesbian cultural figures, as books flutter up and down in the sky like secular cherubim.

Some flag-brandishing marchers aside, there is no reference to social confrontation, which makes the work seem sentimental. But then the site, an inviting Gay and Lesbian Center in a major city library, may itself be a plateau of victory against bias.

The library's grand opening (April 18-21) is free by timed ticket only, available at the kiosk on Fulton Street. Capacity is 3,500. First come, first served.

The New Main Library is at 100 Larkin Street (enter on Larkin, Fulton or Hyde streets). For information, call (415) 557-4400.

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